The Death of the Newsletter: Why It’s Easier to Share Updates As They Happen

After nearly a year and a half of updates, we’re all about to witness the death of the newsletter.

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The End of an Era

I started blogging seriously in October of 2016. Back then, I had a website where I thought it would be fun to document my journey weekly. About six months in, I abandoned that gig to start over, but my obsession with the weekly update continued.

For 52 consecutive weeks, I shared weekly updates about the site and my life. Naturally, these updates quickly became repetitive and annoying, so I thought it would make sense to move to a monthly format.

Unfortunately, these monthly updates have become quite cumbersome. In some cases, they’ve ballooned to over 5000 words which is just outrageous for a monthly recap. As a result, I’ve decided to abandon the monthly newsletter altogether.

Since the addition of membership tiers on the site, I’ve decided to move to an automated weekly newsletter via email. In other words, I will no longer be composing weekly or monthly updates. Instead, subscribers will receive a weekly email with a list of the week’s posts.

If you’re interested in getting this weekly newsletter, why not become a member of The Renegade Coder? In addition to commenting privileges, you’ll be automatically enrolled to receive the weekly newsletter. Alternatively, you can subscribe to the newsletter directly through MailChimp.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop writing update articles! In fact, I’m probably going to write even more updates, but I don’t intend to adhere to some fixed schedule. Instead, I’ll write updates as needed on specific changes.

Cleanup Crew

As a part of the death of the newsletter, I’m looking to cleanup all the newsletters from my site. That doesn’t mean I’ll be deleting all the newsletters. Instead, I’ve chosen to clean up their titles and push the entire collection to its own series called the Legacy Newsletter.

In addition, I’m looking to move many of the “update” blogs over to the update category, so look out for that. For instance, the following are few articles that have been recategorized:

• 5 Ways You Can Support The Renegade Coder
• Patreon Welcomes The Renegade Coder
• Diving into Data Structures

I’m starting to be a lot more disciplined with my three main categories since the addition of memberships. As a result, anything that has to do with changes to my site will have its home in the updates section. Meanwhile, my personal life will be restricted to the blog area, and coding articles will be categorized as code.

Mischief Managed

Overall, I’m huge fan of this change. As you can probably tell, I’ve been doing a ton of simplification on this site as I move into my PhD program. For instance, I got rid of the store, and I removed a ton of plugins. All of this clutter has become quite a maintenance nightmare, and I want to get back to doing what I love: coding and writing.

Now, I can focus on writing when I want to write on topics that I actually want to write about. No longer will I be forcing myself to do any sort of useless repetitive processes like generating a weekly or monthly newsletter. Instead, I’ll be focusing on tasks that provide me value. In the end, I’ll be passing that value onto you through my various creations.

As always, thanks for taking the time to read this article. Of course, don’t forget to subscribe, so you can share your feedback below.